Leadership

What's Better Than Brainstorming?

By Jessica Stillman

Updated on: February 10, 2009 / 11:54 AM EST / MoneyWatch

The Find: Thanks to one business psychologist, brainstorming's many detractors now have an alternative â€" "brainwriting."
The Source: A post on the work of business psychologist Peter Heslin on the BPS Research Digest.

The Takeaway: Recently BNET1 laid out the case against brainstorming and plenty of readers chimed in to complain about how ineffective the technique is for generating quality new ideas (and a couple also leaped to its defense). Those who aren't fans get some support today on the British Psychological Society's blog, which reports, "research shows that people actually come up with more ideas working on their own than they do brainstorming together." But if brainstorming is ineffective, what actually works? Business psychologist Heslin suggests brainwriting:

Briefly, it involves four group members writing ideas on slips of paper in silence. Group members pass the slips of paper between each other, reading others' ideas and inserting their own. Ink color indicates who owns which ideas and when a paper slip has four ideas on it, it is placed in the center of the table for all to see. This is repeated up to 25 times. The second stage involves group members withdrawing to the corners of the room and recalling as many of the ideas generated so far as possible - the rationale being that this encourages attention to the ideas generated. The final stage involves group members working alone for 15 minutes in an attempt to generate yet more ideas.

Research has shown the technique to generate more ideas than the more conventional group idea shout out. To learn more, managers can read Heslin's paper in the journal Occupational and Organizational Psychology.

The Question: Does brainwriting sound like a viable alternative to brainstorming?

(Image of human brain by Gaetan Lee, CC 2.0)